This section is intended to provide information relevant to understanding various technologies described herein. As the section's title implies, this is a discussion of related art that should in no way imply that it is prior art. Generally, related art may or may not be considered prior art. It should therefore be understood that any statement in this section should be read in this light, and not as any admission of prior art.
Generally, a voltage converter refers to an electric power converter that changes a voltage of an electrical power source. Some voltage converters may be implemented as DC-DC voltage converters with fixed conversion ratios. Some DC-DC voltage converters may be implemented with binary conversion ratios.
FIG. 1 illustrates a diagram of a conventional fixed-ratio binary converter 100 as known in the art. As shown, a first source voltage VDD and a second source voltage VSS are provided as inputs to multiple multiplexers MUX_1, MUX_1, . . . , MUX_N. The output of first MUX_1 is provided to a first converter 1 along with the second source voltage VSS. The output of second MUX_2 is provided to a second converter 2 along with the output of the first converter 1. The output of last MUX_N is then provided to a last converter N along with the output of the second converter 2. The output of the last MUX_N is the provided as an output voltage VOUT.
In this manner, this conventional binary converter 100 is configured to generate binary conversion ratios but is unable to effectively generate arbitrary conversion ratios with high resolution. Also, this conventional binary converter 100 is somewhat inefficient in maintaining output conductance when compared to fixed-ratio converters.